Mandarin Blueprint is a worthy partner in your learning
Signed up for Mandarin Blueprint even though my wife is Chinese and should be able to help. 1/ Pro's - Easy to use, you follow their system, which they thoroughly explain, the how's, the why's, the traps, everything that the future holds for you in the course and you go through it, trusting that it will work. The course is taught with a lot of logic, they pick many common words/ characters/ and components with an eye to how useful they are in general Mandarin. When there is an oddball word used (Halberd) they clearly explain 'why' they would teach an obscure word early in the course. Stuff makes sense. There is a real sense of progress with lots of PDFs along the way to give you an alternative way to cement information into your daily life. Your Mandarin may be getting better in other methods, but sometimes a "sense of progress" is the motivation that determines whether you actually stick with it to fluency. Subscription models may be cheaper, and actually more viable long term, but a 'pay once and it's yours forever' model actually appealed to me the most. I do not want to pay for when I get really busy and don't have time for the course. I also travel some, and being online is problematic at times, so having bought it like a book, I can go back to it whenever, and it doesn't feel like I am wasting anything. (I can see the 'wasting' feeling also being motivation for some) I like these guys. They come across as 'nice' in the videos, very likeable, and this makes it much easier to watch all of the videos. I also appreciate that they bring in 'guest students' to describe some of the students' memory palace stories. I do wish they had a native female speaker to rotate in. Having a native speaker might give us a different accent or phrasing than two guys who learned English first, then Mandarin. My wife says Luuk and Phil's Mandarin is excellent, but when I was in China, there were lots of pronunciations I did not catch, because native Mandarin speakers don't always speak perfectly. So, female Native Mandarin speaker would be a nice add on. The platform itself is complicated. Way too complicated in my opinion. There is a Mandarin Blueprint Lite version which is free for many lessons. (great resource no matter where you wind up) and if you buy their Pro course, you still study on the Lite platform for a lot of videos. Imagine you buy a "premium" course, which is expensive, but you remain on the Lite free course for weeks? Add in that you also use flashcards, which were originally Anki, but transitioned to Traverse. Add in that there is a podcast, but most of us use Apple podcast or some other podcast server to listen to podcasts. Add in there is a "Discord type" channel called Skool (?) perhaps if you want to chat about the course in their community. But, if you click on "Community" on their webpage, you get a different page which asks you to figure out your seniority before you get redirected ? Then the flashcard system is difficult to navigate. In my Traverse (my settings may be bad, or I am terrible at Traverse) the relevant sections were at the bottom of 120 sections, which I had to constantly 'find', rather than being in chronological order based on how you would study the sections. Traverse is not intuitive to me, but that might be a 'me' issue. So, I listed more "Cons" than "Pros" but don't want to give y'all the wrong idea. This course has a lot of value for me. It has well conceived learning paths, lessons that are well thought out as to length and value to you as a student. They speak Mandarin extremely well, so listening to them is easy to understand and a great guideline as to how we should sound. And the production value is top notch. It looks professional. It feels professional. It sounds professional. For me, it was money well spent! My wife is complimenting me on my progress, her friends are commenting on how improved my pronunciations are, etc, etc etc. Although it is not inexpensive, I have no doubt that I will get my money's worth, and more importantly "Learn to speak Mandarin" .....